PROMOTING GREEN TOURISM FOR FUTURE SUSTAINABILITY

Green tourism is defined as environmentally friendly tourism activities with various focuses and meanings. In a broad term, green tourism is about being an environmentally friendly tourist or providing environmentally friendly tourist services. The green tourism concept would be highly appealing to tourism enterprises and operators owing to increasing governmental pressure to improve environmental performance by adopting effective and tangible environmental management techniques. Furthermore, achievement and promotion of internationally recognized environmental awards would be instrumental to the tourism enterprises in marketing their services. As a result, many concerned and responsible parties put forward recommendations for green tourism products to regulate tourism’s negative impacts. This conceptual paper attempts to discuss green tourism concept, green tourism certification and its processes as well explain the comparative approaches of green tourism in a few countries. Towards the end, by this green labeling, the industry can legitimately open up new areas for the more discriminating and wider range of the market, and tourists or visitors can enjoy the holiday they want with a clear conscience.green, tourism, certification, sustainability.

A Roadmap Toward a Unified Space Communication Architecture

In recent years, the number of space exploration missions has multiplied. Such an increase raises the question of effective communication between the multitude of human-made objects spread across our solar system. An efficient and scalable communication architecture presents multiple challenges, including the distance between planetary entities, their motion and potential obstruction, the limited available payload on satellites, and the high mission cost. This paper brings together recent relevant specifications, standards, mission demonstrations, and the most recent proposals to develop a unified architecture for deep-space internetworked communication. After characterizing the transmission medium and its unique challenges, we explore the available communication technologies and frameworks to establish a reliable communication architecture across the solar system. We then draw an evolutive roadmap for establishing a scalable communication architecture. This roadmap builds upon the mission-centric communication architectures in the upcoming years towards a fully interconnected network or InterPlanetary Internet (IPN). We finally discuss the tools available to develop such an architecture in the short, medium, and long terms. The resulting architecture cross-supports space agencies on the solar system-scale while significantly decreasing space communication costs. Through this analysis, we derive the critical research questions remaining for creating the IPN regarding the considerable challenges of space communication.Peer reviewe

6G Mobile-Edge Empowered Metaverse: Requirements, Technologies, Challenges and Research Directions

The Metaverse has emerged as the successor of the conventional mobile internet to change people's lifestyles. It has strict visual and physical requirements to ensure an immersive experience (i.e., high visual quality, low motion-to-photon latency, and real-time tactile and control experience). However, the current communication systems fall short to satisfy these requirements. Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been indispensable to enable low latency and powerful computing. Moreover, the sixth generation (6G) networks promise to provide end users with high-capacity communications to MEC servers. In this paper, we bring together the primary components into a 6G mobile-edge framework to empower the Metaverse. This includes the usage of heterogeneous radios, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and digital twins (DTs). We also discuss novel communication paradigms (i.e., semantic communication, holographic-type communication, and haptic communication) to further satisfy the demand for human-type communications and fulfil user preferences and immersive experiences in the Metaverse

Bi-directional Digital Twin and Edge Computing in the Metaverse

The Metaverse has emerged to extend our lifestyle beyond physical limitations. As essential components in the Metaverse, digital twins (DTs) are the digital replicas of physical items. DTs enable emulation of real-world scenarios and prediction for energy and resource-efficient operation, resulting in sustainable applications. End users access the Metaverse using a variety of devices (e.g., head-mounted devices (HMDs)), mostly lightweight. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) provides responsive services to the end users, leading to an immersive Metaverse experience. With the anticipation to represent physical objects, end users, and edge computing systems as DTs in the Metaverse, the construction of these DTs and the interplay between them have not been investigated. In this paper, we discuss the bidirectional reliance between the DT and the MEC system and investigate the creation of DTs of objects and users on the MEC servers and DT-assisted edge computing (DTEC). We also study the interplay between the DTs and DTECs to allocate the resources fairly and optimally and provide an immersive experience in the Metaverse. Owing to the dynamic network states (e.g., channel states) and mobility of the users, we discuss the interplay between local DTECs (on local MEC servers) and the global DTEC (on cloud server) to cope with the handover among MEC servers and avoid intermittent Metaverse services

Street Smart in 5G : Vehicular Applications, Communication, and Computing

Recent advances in information technology have revolutionized the automotive industry, paving the way for next-generation smart vehicular mobility. Specifically, vehicles, roadside units, and other road users can collaborate to deliver novel services and applications that leverage, for example, big vehicular data and machine learning. Relatedly, fifth-generation cellular networks (5G) are being developed and deployed for low-latency, high-reliability, and high bandwidth communications. While 5G adjacent technologies such as edge computing allow for data offloading and computation at the edge of the network thus ensuring even lower latency and context-awareness. Overall, these developments provide a rich ecosystem for the evolution of vehicular applications, communications, and computing. Therefore in this work, we aim at providing a comprehensive overview of the state of research on vehicular computing in the emerging age of 5G and big data. In particular, this paper highlights several vehicular applications, investigates their requirements, details the enabling communication technologies and computing paradigms, and studies data analytics pipelines and the integration of these enabling technologies in response to application requirements.Peer reviewe

Driving Big Data : A First Look at Driving Behavior via a Large-Scale Private Car Dataset

The increasing number of privately owned vehicles in large metropolitan cities has contributed to traffic congestion, increased energy waste, raised CO2 emissions, and impacted our living conditions negatively. Analysis of data representing citizens' driving behavior can provide insights to reverse these conditions. This article presents a large-scale driving status and trajectory dataset consisting of 426,992,602 records collected from 68,069 vehicles over a month. From the dataset, we analyze the driving behavior and produce random distributions of trip duration and millage to characterize car trips. We have found that a private car has more than 17% probability to make four trips per day, and a trip has more than 25% probability to last 20-30 minutes and 33% probability to travel 10 Kilometers during the trip. The collective distributions of trip mileage and duration follow Weibull distribution, whereas the hourly trips follow the well known diurnal pattern and so the hourly fuel efficiency. Based on these findings, we have developed an application which recommends the drivers to find the nearby gas stations and possible favorite places from past trips. We further highlight that our dataset can be applied for developing dynamic Green maps for fuel-efficient routing, modeling efficient Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, verifying existing V2V protocols, and understanding user behavior in driving their private cars.Peer reviewe